Lucioball returns! Summer Games back in full swing with Patch Notes 1.27.0.1

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Published on: 10/08/2018

Another year, another edition of Summer Games skins and Lucioball in rotation. The Overwatch development team pulled out all the stops with new skins galore as a slew of heroes find themselves with new gear for the Summer Games with Reinhardt, Moira, D.VA and Roadhog receiving new skins. Lucioball takes the stage yet again in Busan Stadium as the Dev team have taken time to add a bit of Busan flare to the Lucioball stadium for this edition of Summer Games.

Lucio ball, Lucio buffs

The Summer of 2018 may well be regarded as the Summer of Lucio for Overwatch players as Lucio received a very nice buff on top of his trademark game mode being reintroduced. The potency of Lucio’s heals and shields during his ult animation have been improved dramatically as the starting number of his temporary shields have increased from 500 to 750.

On top of this change, Lucio’s aura radius for his ‘Crossfade’ healing and speed boosts have been increased from 10 metres to 12. This small but effective buff will give Lucio a bit more presence on smaller control maps and overall improves the potency of his heal and speed increase.

In addition to this healer buff, Moira’s passive energy regeneration gets some much needed love as the ratio for increase is improved from 2 to 2.4 per second. Ana’s ultimate ability Nano Boost is also mightily improved with the Dev team granting an instant 300 health upon cast as well as increasing the cast range of her Nano Boost from 30 to 40 metres.

In order to not make healers too over tuned this patch, Mercy’s healing beam has been reduced from 60 healing per second to 50, as Blizzard development continues to find the sweet spot for Mercy’s otherwise obnoxious healing prowess.

Snipers feeling the pain, Zyra Grav tuned up

Conversely, another area of punishment for the Blizzard team came down to mobility on high damage snipers such as Hanzo and Widowmaker as their movement based skills have been taxed slightly. Hanzo’s lunge cooldown has increased from four seconds to five as Widowmaker’s grapple hook has also been increased from eight seconds to ten.

Although she isn’t a sniper, Brigitte’s mobility has also been hindered with the recent patch changes as her shield bash cooldown has been increased from six seconds to seven. Accompanying this change is the added option to toggle the sensitivity for her Repair Pack skill to make it easier to prioritize allied targets that you actually want to toggle in high paced teamfights.

Another semi impactful change that was made in this iteration of the Patch Notes is to Zyra and her kit. First, the radius for her Graviton Surge has been decreased from eight metres to six metres. This new change is made to make the counter play to her ultimate a little bit more possible as the enemy team isn’t immediately punished for grouping together in certain areas of the map.

To combat the slight nerf to her ultimate, the Blizzard development team has tweaked the ratio of her Energy drain from 2 energy per second to 1.6. This tweak is made to make Zarya players more confident in their main use of damage and conversely, improve ultimate cooldown rates while building up high Energy levels.